


Two Bits

by Masu_Trout



Category: Fallout 3
Genre: Developing Relationship, Emotionally Repressed, F/M, Haircuts, Trust Issues, Trust Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-14
Updated: 2016-10-14
Packaged: 2018-08-22 10:09:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8282105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: The Lone Wanderer is in need of a haircut, and Charon somehow finds himself volunteered for the task.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I love thinking about everyday life in the Wasteland and I love Charon, so... voila!

“You won't be angry,” Charon said. It wasn't meant to be a question, but it sure came out like one.

The Lone Wanderer sighed and turned to look at him out of the corner of her eye. The rickety metal chair squeaked and squealed with the movement; every damn time she sat down in that thing he swore it was going to break, but it hadn't given up on her yet. 

They were both up early, long before the city had fully woken. The sun was only beginning to show over Megaton's high walls, and none of its merchants or layabout settlers were out wandering the packed-dirt paths yet.

Not safe. Never safe, not with so many strangers—so many _humans_ —pressing in on them from all sides. Not when there were so many places where an attacker could hide.

But still, it was something close. Peaceful, maybe. Or perhaps that was just the satisfaction of having watched Ahzrukhal bleed out on the floor still burning within his chest.

The Lone Wanderer's chair squeaked once more. Charon turned his attention back to his employer with a quick pang of guilt. Not like him to lose focus in the middle of a conversation. 

She was watching him steadily, her arms thrown over the back of the chair and her dark eyes unreadable. “Look,” she said, “I'll be _angry_ if I get myself scalped because I was stupid enough to let a raider grab my hair twice.”

Charon didn't say anything to that. After a moment, she sighed. “No, I won't be angry. Promise.” 

She sounded genuine enough, which—if it were Ahzrukhal, would've made his skin crawl. Should've made his skin crawl even now, really. He knew about the sorts of _promises_ employers made, the ways they found to dig their fingers into the smallest of loopholes and pull them wide open. There were only two things Charon could trust: his instincts and the terms of his contract.

His pulse wasn't jumping, though. Nothing in his brain was telling him to be wary. He felt… not-tense, not-afraid, even with this obvious trap open and waiting before him. It was a sign of something.

Approaching insanity, maybe. All this wasteland air couldn't be good for him.

“There's a barber back in Underworld,” Charon said, and then: “my contract only covers combat situations.”

It was a line of reasoning he'd tried on Ahzrukhal dozens (hundreds? Thousands? Fuck, just how long had he been with that man?) of times before, and he knew how well it tended to work. It was the wasteland; anything could be a combat situation if you looked at it from the right angle.

( _Of course I'll help you,_ Ahzrukhal had purred to the newly-born ghoul sitting across the bar from him, so young she was still peeling layers of fresh skin off her arms, and then he'd sent Charon into her room at night to slit her throat and make it look like a suicide. She could've led humans back into Underworld, Ahzrukhal had said. She could've threatened them all. (She could've threatened his business, the way she talked about trading routes and caravans, and Charon knew well enough to read between the lines even if he didn't know the words to protest.) _Us versus them. A combat situation._

And now he was standing at the shoulder of the human Ahzrukhal had sold him to, being asked to put his knife to his employer's neck. Strange how things worked out.)

The Lone Wanderer laughed a little at that, though Charon didn't understand the joke. “No offense, Charon, but Snowflake is _really_ into his jet. I'd rather not let a man with shaking hands handle my head.”

“He has experience.”

“He has twenty-five inhalers stashed under his mattress, is what he has.”

He scowled. His hand felt for the barrel of his shotgun, half of its own accord. “You've been poking around.”

Not that he hadn't done worse, so much worse, but—it was the principle of the thing. The people of Underworld had housed him, fed him, smiled at him as they passed even when there was blood flecked on his hands. Their acceptance of Ahzrukhal didn't taint those small kindnesses. If she was stealing from those who had so little... 

Charon wouldn't sit back and allow it. That was all there was to it. Somehow, he'd finally managed to slip Ahzrukhal's tether; running at the heels of yet another person trying to take advantage of the ghouls would make him no better than an animal.

(He couldn't fight it, his contract was clear, but he couldn't lie down and accept it either—)

She looked up at him. Her gaze flickered from his eyes to his shotgun then back again, but she didn't draw a weapon. “Yes,” she agreed, “but I didn't take anything. I don't steal from the living. I'm just too curious for my own good.” Her lips turned up into a quiet smile. “My dad always told me so.”

Charon blinked. Snooping around was… harmless enough. ( _Better than anything you've ever done for them,_ a small voice in his head added.) If she truly was only looking, there was nothing he could object to. Gossip was practically a second currency in Underworld—Ahzrukhal had done sinister things on the daily with the knowledge he'd pulled from the sad drunks at his bar, but no one else in Underworld had meant any harm by their idle chatter. Certainly it was nowhere near the level of chaos a human could bring to the ghouls' city, if one so desired.

Easiest to assume she was lying, of course. If The Lone Wanderer were a thief, there was no reason she'd tell him so right away. It would be simpler for her to worm her way into his trust, let her orders build gradually until he'd (once again) forgotten how to refuse even the vilest commands. 

Her eyes looked very honest, though, and she hadn't lied to him yet. Every mission they'd gone on so far had ended just as she'd promised it would: no surprise innocents to kill or unexpected targets to fight. They went together on their missions, shared the risks and the rewards. She hadn't yet sent him into danger alone.

She'd been very different from Ahzrukhal so far. Perhaps she could continue being different.

“Okay,” he said. His hand dropped from his shotgun to wrap around the hilt of his knife instead.

“Hm?”

“I'll do it. Turn around.”

She beamed at him then, her smile Vault-white and gleaming, and settled into the chair with her back to her house and her face turned towards the open crater of Megaton. The houses here were all tin shacks, but they were tin shacks in _very_ high demand and he had no idea what a single scavenger like her could have done to earn one. Hadn't been sure she'd take kindly to him asking. Sometimes they didn't—nobody hired Charon because he was good at wondering things.

Charon hadn't even asked her name yet. Maybe he should, when he got the chance.

He slid his combat knife from its sheath and settled his other hand at the base of her neck, trying to work out how exactly he was going to cut the hair away without taking her skin with it. She had dark skin—smooth, natural dark, not ghoul-black and rotting away—and even darker hair, bunched up in tight little curls all about her skull. It wasn't the sort of hair you could just gather up and shear down to the ears with one quick stroke.

After a moment of thought he curled his hand in it, pulling together as much as he could. He drew his knife against the base of her scalp and slid it across carefully, slow and cautious like he was slitting a throat instead of lopping off a chunk of hair.

When it finally came away, he was left with a fistful of tight, springy curls. The Lone Wanderer's hair had a patch missing from it, a spot like a dent or a pothole where her hair was only a quarter-inch long. Were it anyone else, he might have laughed.

“Everything okay?” she asked after a moment too long of silence.

“…Eh,” he managed finally. “It's going.” 

Shaved heads all looked the same in the end, after all. Everything would be fine so long as she didn't ask for a mirror halfway through.

He dropped the hair, letting it fall across the rusted-tin floor—one of the locals here could clean it up, at least then they'd have something to do—and tugged another patch tight for his knife. Gather, cut, repeat… it was an easy rhythm to fall into, not much different than cleaning his shotgun or sniping off molerats.

_Combat situation,_ he thought, and very nearly smiled.

It was such a strange thing, to be trusted with this. To be given a knife and told _stand behind me_. Charon could no more harm her than he could slit his own throat—his contract bound his hands, stayed his weapon, tied him to her more securely than any rope and collar—but The Lone Wanderer had no way of knowing that. She hadn't tested him the way Ahzrukhal so loved to; she'd never taken him apart, pulled at his morals, pressed him up against his limits until he very nearly broke. There was no way for her to know what he was capable of and what he wasn't.

Any other man might have taken the opportunity to slit her throat. If she had caps enough to purchase him, she had caps enough to make killing her very profitable indeed.

And yet… and yet she trusted him still. He brushed his hand against her throat as he gathered up the next handful of hair, just to see if she'd flinch.

No reaction. Not even an intake of breath.

_Idiot,_ he thought, and he couldn't tell if he was scornful or terrified. Someone out here was going to kill her, and it wouldn't be with a frag mine or a sniper rifle. All it would take was a friendly smile and a knife slipped between her ribs—she wouldn't even have time to realize she'd been betrayed before her body hit the ground.

Most of the larger chunks of hair where gone by now, shaved off and lying in clumps at his feet. He gave her head a quick look-over, then set to the task of evening out what was left. 

That was why she'd chosen him, though, wasn't it? The Lone Wanderer knew how to charm people and trade goods and earn tin-roofed houses—what she needed was someone to tell her when not to take the cordial hand being offered to her. There was a balance between the two of them. She saw the best in everyone and he trusted no one at all.

She'd paid good money for him, after all. Charon remembered watching her pour piles of caps into Ahzrukhal's hands, just before she walked over and gave him the news. He had to have _some_ value to her.

(Charon had assumed the caps were for chems or an assassination, one sort of hit or another, because those were the only two things anyone paid _that_ much to Ahzrukhal for. He remembered curling the ruined remains of his lip as he wondered which exactly it would be. Would Charon be killing someone tonight to line his employer's pockets? Delivering a crate of psycho to be spread through the wasteland? And then she'd walked over to him, familiar folded square of paper clenched tight in her hand and—

And things were different now. Sometimes he still could hardly believe it had happened.)

It only took a few moments to get things mostly even. There wasn't much left on her head to straighten out. Charon took a step back to check over his handiwork.

The Lone Wanderer had about a quarter-inch of fuzz left all around, a tiny halo of dark hair that looked almost like the down of a newly-hatched chick. 

“Huh,” he said. It had been a long time since he'd thought of pre-war things.

“What?” The Lone Wanderer twisted around to face him once more, eyes wide with worry. “Is it done? Does it look bad?”

“It's done. You look like a bird.” And then, because he probably hadn't been clear enough with the first statement: “It's not bad.”

“A bird?” She laughed a little then, staring up at him with an inscrutable look in her eyes. (Not angry, at least. Charon knew how to recognize angry.) “Well, I suppose there's a lot worse comparisons out there. I was half-afraid you were going to say I looked like a mole rat.”

“You'd be a very burnt mole rat.”

That only made her laugh harder; she caught the edge of her palm in her mouth to muffle the sound. Smart, he knew—sound traveled far in this tin echo chamber of a town, and no one would appreciate it if she woke them up—but still a shame. She had a pleasant laugh.

After a moment to calm herself, she reached up to run a hand though her hair. “Oh! It feels so light.”

“No one will be able to grab it now,” Charon said. That fight had been a bad deal. He'd shot that raider an extra few times, unloaded the shotgun until his head was nothing but pulp. It had been more out of anger towards himself than any hatred for his opponent—he never should have let an attacker get so close.

“That's right,” The Lone Wanderer agreed, and then she grinned up at him even wider than before. “Thank you so much! It's perfect.”

Charon could have pointed out that he was her employee. She held his contract; there was no need for her to thank him for anything. He could have turned aside and said nothing, the way he always did when Ahzrukhal deigned to slide a barbed little compliment his way.

He didn't do either. It wouldn't have been right, not when he felt… _satisfied_ in finishing this task for her. Instead, he took a deep breath, looked The Lone Wanderer in the eyes, and said, “You're welcome.”

Her answering smile felt like a sentence all its own.


End file.
